Author: Hans H. SkeiPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
Faulkner and Other Southern Writers
Author: Hans H. SkeiPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition
Author: Noel PolkPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604733233
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South's literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking. His essays in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition maintain an abiding interest in Polk's major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work's larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse--the bricks and mortar, as it were--and a work's grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk's scholarship. Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition collects Polk's essays from the late-1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South's literary heritage, the volume asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis. Noel Polk is professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of the Mississippi Quarterly . From 1981 to 2006, he edited the Library of America's complete edition of William Faulkner's novels. He is the author of Outside the Southern Myth; Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner; and Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work .
William Faulkner and Southern History
Author: Joel WilliamsonPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195356403
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 539
Book Description
One of America's great novelists, William Faulkner was a writer deeply rooted in the American South. In works such as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner drew powerfully on Southern themes, attitudes, and atmosphere to create his own world and place--the mythical Yoknapatawpha County--peopled with quintessential Southerners such as the Compsons, Sartorises, Snopes, and McCaslins. Indeed, to a degree perhaps unmatched by any other major twentieth-century novelist, Faulkner remained at home and explored his own region--the history and culture and people of the South. Now, in William Faulkner and Southern History, one of America's most acclaimed historians of the South, Joel Williamson, weaves together a perceptive biography of Faulkner himself, an astute analysis of his works, and a revealing history of Faulkner's ancestors in Mississippi--a family history that becomes, in Williamson's skilled hands, a vivid portrait of Southern culture itself. Williamson provides an insightful look at Faulkner's ancestors, a group sketch so brilliant that the family comes alive almost as vividly as in Faulkner's own fiction. Indeed, his ancestors often outstrip his characters in their colorful and bizarre nature. Williamson has made several discoveries: the Falkners (William was the first to spell it "Faulkner") were not planter, slaveholding "aristocrats"; Confederate Colonel Falkner was not an unalloyed hero, and he probably sired, protected, and educated a mulatto daughter who married into America's mulatto elite; Faulkner's maternal grandfather Charlie Butler stole the town's money and disappeared in the winter of 1887-1888, never to return. Equally important, Williamson uses these stories to underscore themes of race, class, economics, politics, religion, sex and violence, idealism and Romanticism--"the rainbow of elements in human culture"--that reappear in Faulkner's work. He also shows that, while Faulkner's ancestors were no ordinary people, and while he sometimes flashed a curious pride in them, Faulkner came to embrace a pervasive sense of shame concerning both his family and his culture. This he wove into his writing, especially about sex, race, class, and violence, psychic and otherwise. William Faulkner and Southern History represents an unprecedented publishing event--an eminent historian writing on a major literary figure. By revealing the deep history behind the art of the South's most celebrated writer, Williamson evokes new insights and deeper understanding, providing anyone familiar with Faulkner's great novels with a host of connections between his work, his life, and his ancestry.
Twentieth-Century Southern Literature
Author: J. A. BryantJr.Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813187400
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 430
Book Description
Authors discussed include: Wendell Berry, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, Zora Neal Hurston, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, and many more. By World War II, the Southern Renaissance had established itself as one of the most significant literary events of the century, and today much of the best American fiction is southern fiction. Though the flowering of realistic and local-color writing during the first two decades of the century was a sign of things to come, the period between the two world wars was the crucial one for the South's literary development: a literary revival in Richmond came to fruition; at Vanderbilt University a group of young men produced The Fugitive, a remarkable, controversial magazine that published some of the century's best verse in its brief run; and the publication and widespread recognition of Faulkner (among others) inaugurated the great flood of southern writing that was to follow in novels, short stories, poetry, and plays. With more than forty years of experience writing and reading about the subject, and friendships with many of the figures discussed, J. A. Bryant is uniquely qualified to provide the first comprehensive account of southern American literature since 1900. Bryant pays attention to both the cultural and the historical context of the works and authors discussed, and presents the information in an enjoyable, accessible style. No lover of great American literature can afford to be without this book.
The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War
Author: Michael GorraPublisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631491717
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418
Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.
Faulkner and the Southern Renaissance
Author: Doreen FowlerPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617033896
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
Ledgers of History
Author: Sally WolffPublisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807137782
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Francisco grew up at McCarroll Place, his familyb2ss ancestral home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, thirty miles north of Oxford. In the conversations with Wolff, he recalls that as a boy he would sit and listen as his father and Faulkner sat on the gallery and talked about whatever came to mind. Francisco frequently told stories to Faulkner, many of them oft-repeated, about his family and community, which dated to antebellum times. Some of these stories, Wolff shows, found their way into Faulknerb2ss fiction. Faulkner also displayed an absorbing interest in a seven-volume diary kept by Dr. Franciscob2ss great-great-grandfather Francis Terry Leak, who owned extensive plantation lands in northern Mississippi before the Civil War. Some parts of the diary recount incidents in Leakb2ss life, but most of the diary concerns business transactions, including the buying and selling of slaves and the building of a plantation home.
William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape
Author: Charles Shelton AikenPublisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820332194
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
Charles S. Aiken, a native of Mississippi who was born a few miles from Oxford, has been thinking and writing about the geography of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County for more than thirty years. William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape is the culmination of that long-term scholarly project. It is a fresh approach to a much-studied writer and a provocative meditation on the relationship between literary imagination and place. Four main geographical questions shape Aiken's journey to the family seat of the Compsons and the Snopeses. What patterns and techniques did Faulkner use--consciously or subconsciously--to convert the real geography of Lafayette County into a fictional space? Did Faulkner intend Yoknapatawpha to serve as a microcosm of the American South? In what ways does the historical geography of Faulkner's birthplace correspond to that of the fictional world he created? Finally, what geographic legacy has Faulkner left us through the fourteen novels he set in Yoknapatawpha? With an approach, methodology, and sources primarily derived from historical geography, Aiken takes the reader on a tour of Faulkner's real and imagined worlds. The result is an informed reading of Faulkner's life and work and a refined understanding of the relation of literary worlds to the real places that inspire them.
Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas
Author: Jay WatsonPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496806352
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Book Description
Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Thadious M. Davis, Matthew Dischinger, Dotty Dye, Chiyuma Elliott, Doreen Fowler, Joseph Fruscione, T. Austin Graham, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Lisa Hinrichsen, Randall Horton, George Hutchinson, Andrew B. Leiter, John Wharton Lowe, Jamaal May, Ben Robbins, Tim A. Ryan, Sharon Eve Sarthou, Jenna Sciuto, James Smethurst, and Jay Watson At the turn of the millennium, the Martinican novelist Édouard Glissant offered the bold prediction that “Faulkner’s oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans,” a goal that “will be achieved by a radically ‘other’ reading.” In the spirit of Glissant’s prediction, this collection places William Faulkner’s literary oeuvre in dialogue with a hemispheric canon of black writing from the United States and the Caribbean. The volume’s seventeen essays and poetry selections chart lines of engagement, dialogue, and reciprocal resonance between Faulkner and his black precursors, contemporaries, and successors in the Americas. Contributors place Faulkner’s work in illuminating conversation with writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Randall Kenan, Edward P. Jones, and Natasha Trethewey, along with the musical artistry of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton. In addition, five contemporary African American poets offer their own creative responses to Faulkner’s writings, characters, verbal art, and historical example. In these ways, the volume develops a comparative approach to the Faulkner oeuvre that goes beyond the compelling but limiting question of influence—who read whom, whose works draw from whose—to explore the confluences between Faulkner and black writing in the hemisphere.
The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South
Author: Sharon MonteithPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110743467X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Book Description
This Companion maps the dynamic literary landscape of the American South. From pre- and post-Civil War literature to modernist and civil rights fictions and writing by immigrants in the 'global' South of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars explore the region's established and emergent literary traditions. Touching on poetry and song, drama and screenwriting, key figures such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, and iconic texts such as Gone with the Wind, chapters investigate how issues of class, poverty, sexuality and regional identity have textured Southern writing across generations. The volume's rich contextual approach highlights patterns and connections between writers while offering insight into the development of Southern literary criticism, making this Companion a valuable guide for students and teachers of American literature, American studies and the history of storytelling in America.